Bloomington, Ill. — I received an early Christmas present in December, when Illinois Shakespeare Festival director Kevin Rich wrote me a long email describing Illinois Shakes' upcoming, three-play summer season, which would feature Milwaukee actors Matt Daniels, Todd Denning, Norman Moses and Deborah Staples — with two of the three productions being directed by the talented, Milwaukee-based tandem of Paula Suozzi and Jonathan West.

That was reason enough to make plans for a return trip to this company's central Illinois stomping grounds, which I'd first visited last summer. But it gets better.

Rich had chosen plays that would function as an ingenious, interlocking trilogy, focused on the constructions and constrictions defining what it means to be a woman. Playing two very different women while fantasizing life as yet a third, the magnificent Staples — who we're not seeing nearly enough of on Milwaukee stages these days — would serve as the linchpin.

Suozzi would direct Timothy Findley's "Elizabeth Rex," with Staples playing the 67-year-old Elizabeth during the long night in 1601 preceding the execution of the Earl of Essex — her onetime favorite and possible lover — for treason. In Findley's play, Elizabeth struggles to reconcile what she feels as a woman with the political duties requiring her to walk like a man.

History tells us that Elizabeth spent part of that night watching Shakespeare's company perform. Findley envisions Elizabeth attending a performance of "Much Ado About Nothing" — second of the three Illinois Shakes plays, directed by West — in which a witty Beatrice offers one view of how a spirited woman might be fully herself while living in a man's world. As would have been true in Elizabeth's time, Illinois Shakes would perform "Much Ado" with an all-male cast.

"Rex" opens just after this imagined performance of "Much Ado" ends; seeking distraction, Elizabeth then joins Shakespeare and his company of actors in the barn where they're spending the night.

While there, Elizabeth gets a sneak peek at Shakespeare's "Antony and Cleopatra" — third of the Illinois Shakes plays, featuring Denning and Staples in the title roles and directed by Rich. The greatest of Shakespeare's female characters, Cleopatra offers Elizabeth yet another way of thinking about what it means to be a woman — while driving home the fear women provoke when the personal mixes with the political.

'Elizabeth Rex,' Faerie Queene

Once upon a time, there was a woman who dreamed of being a king — and then became one.

But as with Friedrich Schiller's depiction of England's queen in "Mary Stuart" — a play in which Staples once played the title role, opposite Laura Gordon's Elizabeth — "Rex" conveys the high price Elizabeth paid for making her dream come true.

Nobody familiar with Staples' remarkable ability to disappear into her characters — perhaps best captured by the rapid metamorphoses she underwent while playing seven of them in "The Blonde, the Brunette and the Vengeful Redhead" — will be surprised by her impersonation of the old and tired woman who joins Shakespeare's players in a barn, in her ongoing quest for "distraction" from Essex's imminent execution.

Regally dressed and crowned with an elaborate head piece, Elizabeth looks the part of Edmund Spenser's fabled Faerie Queene. But she is also just two years from death and increasingly unsure of the choices she's made.

"I killed the woman in my heart, that England might survive," she tells us, attempting to justify why she is alone while insisting that she loves no one. Elizabeth wants — needs — to believe this. But the quaver in Staples' voice, the sorrow in her eyes, the pinched discontent at the corner of her mouth and the occasional slump in her overburdened shoulders give the game away. "I shall die of regret," Elizabeth tells us later, as the night wears on and her guard comes down. "For never having been myself."

She isn't alone. Ned, an aging, gay actor dying of the pox — contracted from a beloved soldier later killed in Elizabeth's Irish wars — is described by Elizabeth as "the greatest actor of women in our time." But as Thomas Anthony Quinn's Shakespeare points out, the one part Ned has never learned to play is his own life.

The charismatic Christopher Prentice has no such problem in presenting a Ned who can be brilliant and seemingly fearless in reading and exposing others — including Elizabeth herself — while also proving vulnerable, angry and scared, as Ned avoids what he's lost in the past and what awaits him in the near future.

Findley's play imagines Ned teaching the manlike Elizabeth how to be a woman, while she teaches him the courage required to be fully a man. The character of Beatrice and an early draft of "Antony and Cleopatra" enable the exploration; Shakespeare's players, including Daniels as a handsome but cheeky Irishman and Moses as an aging clown, provide comic relief.

It's a complicated conceit, and Suozzi did well to simplify matters by deleting a framing device emphasizing Shakespeare's role in creating the play we see. Through no fault of either Suozzi or her cast, what remains can still feel as stuffy and close as the air in the players' barn.

"Rex" is smart but not always clear. It's crammed with ideas, but they're not always developed. It often reduces characters to talking heads — good at expositing what they think and why it matters, even as we have the nagging sense that we're watching a well-played but bloodless parlor game.

"Rex" made me wish, frankly, for "Mary Stuart," which explores similar themes, involves higher stakes and is an infinitely better play. Here's hoping Staples gets the chance to revisit it so that she can play Schiller's Elizabeth, too.

A sun-dappled 'Much Ado'

In "Rex," Prentice's Ned had just played Beatrice in the performance seen by Elizabeth; Prentice also plays Beatrice in Illinois Shakes' "Much Ado." That's par for the course in this "Much Ado": The men who had been cast as Elizabethan actors in "Rex" now embody for us the same "Much Ado" characters they'd been impersonating for Elizabeth. The outdoor thrust stage that had been a barn in "Rex" becomes a richly appareled Sicilian villa for "Much Ado."

This is Illinois Shakes' first all-male Shakespeare play and my fourth viewing of such an original-practices production — now all the rage — in the last year alone. Actors — including a very lively Daniels, playing Benedick — warm up and dress on stage. Dress is sumptuously and distinctly Elizabethan (costuming by Lauren M. Lowell). Onstage musicians play Renaissance tunes from an upstage balcony. Scenery is minimal; actors move props. Dancing replaces a curtain call.

True to West's Bialystock & Bloom days in Milwaukee, this "Much Ado" is a gleefully amped-up romp in which there's no such thing as a gag going too far. That allows actors in some of the smaller comedic roles to shine; Moses is particularly good, first as a musician and then as a dimwitted constable who would be right at home with the Keystone Kops.

This is "Much Ado" presented as screwball comedy, for which there's a distinguished pedigree. In such a world, Prentice's sharp-tongued Beatrice and Daniels' swashbuckling Benedick love each other because they love to argue. They do so here with panache, and it's fun to watch — as are the over-the-top scenes in which Benedick and then Beatrice are easily gulled by their friends into finally getting serious with each other.

It's to the credit of these two fine actors that despite the broad tone of this production — so different from the deeper and darker "Much Ado" I just saw at American Players Theatre — Beatrice and Benedick eventually do get serious, briefly sounding this play's darker notes when Benedick pledges to kill Claudio for unjustly wronging Beatrice's kinswoman.

But in a production where the men get a pass for much of their bad behavior and even Claudio comes off sympathetically, that tantalizing glimpse beneath the brightly polished surface doesn't last long. This "Much Ado" keeps it light by staying away from the dark. One can see why an aging Elizabeth might have welcomed such escapist comedy.

The apotheosis of 'Cleopatra'

If Beatrice speaks to one of Elizabeth's fantasies — her memories of a youthful, sun-dappled past — Cleopatra speaks to another, as the story of a mighty ruler who is nevertheless all woman.

Just 15 hours after I'd seen Staples take her final bow as England's stiff and aging queen, she brought this Egyptian fantasy to life, making her first appearance in "Antony and Cleopatra" as a sensual and exotically costumed Cleopatra, suggestively dancing across the indoor stage in Normal that Illinois Shakes uses for matinees and rainy days.

Temperamental and unpredictable, Cleopatra is made to order for Staples, who can turn on a dime and isn't afraid to take chances while doing so.

Staples enacts the grief Antony should feel for his dead wife — and then snaps to, berating Antony for failing to express it. She lolls in bed, voluptuously imagining the absent Antony on top of her — and then anxiously asks if he is well. Enraged at news of Antony's marriage to Octavia, she tries to knife the messenger; later she'll drolly wonder how she stacks up against her rival.

Staples' intoxicating performance reminds us that notwithstanding this play's title, it's primarily Cleopatra's play, and Denning's single-dimensioned Antony — a bellowing relic from a bygone age of heroes — can't keep pace, particularly as the end draws near in the final two acts.

Excepting Daniels (Enobarbus), Moses (Dolabella) and Quinn (soothsayer/clown), the large supporting cast in this wobbly production fails to make a mark — unwittingly underscoring how small the colorless Caesar's new world will be. No wonder Cleopatra chooses to leave it, in a moving and full-throttled death aria which Staples hits out of the park.

Cleopatra's suicide is a bid to transcend the limitations of history and immortalize herself as myth. The meaning of that apotheosis wouldn't have been lost on the famous English queen to come. And it wasn't lost on me as I once again watched this truly great actor, whose work will be remembered long after she herself is gone.

IF YOU GO

The Illinois Shakespeare Festival, a 31/2-hour drive from Milwaukee, continues through Aug. 9. For tickets and info, visit thefestival.org/.

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